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Open source existed, but wasn't as easy to distribute as it is now. I'm also not sure that the education-model Macs would've had a development environment insta
by khedoros1 9y ago
Open source existed, but wasn't as easy to distribute as it is now. I'm also not sure that the education-model Macs would've had a development environment installed to assemble the source (if the Macs I used in the mid-90s at school had software development tools, I was never aware of them, anyhow). And I'm not sure what the options would've looked like for acquiring an open-source set of dev tools for the Mac anyhow (especially considering that Power was a new, still rare hardware architecture at the time).
- duskwuff 9y agoI'm not sure if MPW[1] was free when Graphing Calculator was written. It certainly wasn't easy to find or to use, though. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Programmer%27s_Workshop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Programmer%27s_Works...
- ars 9y agoThis https://archive.org/details/TSLSummer1993 https://archive.org/details/TSLSummer1993 is how you got Open Source software before the Internet (back then called Shareware - although technically they are not the same thing). BBS's existed but were too slow, and expensive.
- khedoros1 9y agoShareware isn't remotely the same as Open Source, though. It was a more-than-demo, more-than-full-version copy of a piece of commercial software, generally designed to be useful on its own, but not useful enough. It was a method of marketing the full version of the software. I've got a few CDs of later collections of the stuff. I remember buying clamshell-packaged games for $5 from Software, Etc (that turned out to be the first 1/3 of the game, for example). I remember seeing the magazines to order it from. I'm aware of shareware, and it's not related to what I was talking about.